That means that 1 in 5 of the people on your list never even have a chance to open your message, because it never reaches their inbox at all.

This study also featured some other email marketing statistics that might come as an unwelcome surprise to you and your organization. But like with anything else, and all of the latest email marketing trends, if you learn from the wealth of information that’s available, you can improve your results.

B2B Email Marketing Coming up Short

To be exact, the study states that only 79.3% of messages are delivered. Of the 20.7% which are not delivered, only 3.3% get sent to the junk box. That means that 17.4% of the emails you send out aren’t delivered, and you don’t even know it most of the time. They don’t show up as bounces or as SPAM, they just are lost in the fold.

Study Shows Some Nuts Are Tougher to Crack

The 5 most strict ISPs– meaning they don’t deliver the highest percentage of your B2B email marketing messages –are:

• Gmail – 23%
• Hotmail – 20%
• MSN – 20 %
• Comcast – 17%
• AOL – 16%

Additionally, when you’re sending B2B email marketing messages you’re much more likely to run into security and firewall programs such as Symantec, which only deliver about 72% of your messages.

You can view the press release download the full study here.

What Can you Learn?

So how can you effectively promote your small business using email marketing? Or for that matter, your medium or large sized corporation? The moral of the story is that you have to cover all of your bases, you can’t assume anything and you always have to be monitoring your results. Here are a few ideas to help you improve your email campaign deliverability:

1. Don’t Settle for an Average ESP – Don’t settle for an average email service provider. Find one that you know you can trust, and that is proven to deliver the results you are looking for.

2. Don’t assume anything – Never assume that anything that doesn’t show up as a bounce is a delivered email. From now on all emails you send out are guilty until being proven innocent.

3. Always clean your list – The cleaner you keep your list, the more you will improve your deliverability and the sooner you will catch any glaring holes or problems with your campaign or your list as a whole.

4. Talk to clients – Pick a random sampling of 10 or 20 names from your list for which you also have their full contact information. Spend half an hour calling all of them to see if they have been receiving your emails or not. If not, be sure to find out if the address you have is correct, who their ISP is and if they use any security firewalls. The more information at your disposal, the easier it will be to spot your own campaign email marketing trends.

5. Strive for perfection – Everything you do with your email campaigns can end up affecting your deliverability. Strive for perfection, and spend the necessary time to create effective, high quality campaigns and then to analyze and optimize them down the road.

As the above new email marketing statistics show, nothing is guaranteed in the world of B2B email marketing. However, if you take the time to understand the issues at hand and how you can to improve upon your shortcomings, you’ll still come out for the better on the other side.

Consider some of these various factors and then get ready to dive headfirst into picking the best email marketing software for you and your company or organization. All of the best email marketing programs for small businesses should enable you to do the following:

1. Work within your budget: Obviously if you are a small business it’s especially important for you to stay within your budgetary constraints. First you have to determine how much you are willing to spend on any of the email marketing programs that you choose. Do you have $10 a month to spend or $50 a month to spend? Ultimately, how much you are charged depends on the size of your list and/or the number of emails you send.

The good news is that many of the best email marketing software providers for small businesses have extremely cheap offers. For example you can

• sign up for an iContact free trial with plans starting at $9.95 per month or you can
• sign up for a Constant Contact free trial with plans starting at $15 per month.

Both of these email service providers provide low cost solutions that meet all of the expectations talked about below.

Considering they are free trials, you can try them or any of the other email marketing programs with free trials that we list with no hesitation, because there is nothing to lose.

2. Easily Create and Customize: Depending on the level of experience or comfort you have with running email campaigns, you may be looking for a different level of control or customization. If you’re just starting out, working with the given templates provided by companies is an easy way to allow you to create high quality, professional emails.

If you have more experience however you may be looking for tools that allow for more customization or for the importing of your own templates, to help differentiate you and your organization even more.

The best email marketing software providers will allow you to do both. Templates are a wonderful way to dive in to the world of email campaigns, but having that added oomph of customization is always beneficial as well.

3. Track and Optimize: Running an email campaign would be a rather futile effort if there was no way to track your results. The tracking capabilities of the best email marketing programs is what makes email one of the most effective forms of advertising and promotion across any medium or spectrum.

You should be able to find out information such as bounces, open rates, click throughs and more. Of course you also need to think about deliverability, which is something that you have control over but also rests in the hands of the email service provider that you choose.

Because of your only partial control over this matter, it elevates the importance of choosing one of the best email marketing software providers out there, which will ensure a high deliverability based on their longstanding reputation and the reputation of their many clients.

4. Experiment with other services: For some people, all they need from their email service provider is a platform to send out their basic newsletters. Many other people though enjoy incorporating customer survey software into their email programs. Other people like being able to automatically post old newsletters to their website, or set up feature rich autoresponders. Be sure the email marketing programs you are looking at have the features that you will wish to experiment with in the future.

Take a look at our articles on the most important email marketing statistics, segmenting your email list and tracking email campaigns for more information.

–Don’t forget about our Race to 50 New RSS Subscribers with a chance to win a free B2B email marketing consulting package.–

This is just an overview meant to give you an idea about how you can pick the best email marketing software for your company or organization. Cost isn’t everything, but it certainly is important. You may prefer to have more customization or an easier platform to work between, and you must be able to track and optimize your campaigns. There is no one best email marketing software, just the one that’s the best fit for your company.

Finding the Best Cheap Email Marketing Providers

There are many great, highly affordable cheap email marketing companies out there today. It’s a list that’s growing everyday and in the past I’ve spent a bit of time talking about a few of them. In the coming months, I’ll be providing some detailed, in depth reviews of many of the popular ESPs to help you and your organization make a sound decision about which provider to use.

In the meantime, there are many different elements that help separate the average ESPs from the best cheap email marketing companies. In order to make a simple decision, you can start crossing off waves of companies that don’t fit what you really are looking for.

First you can eliminate any pretenders you come across. The following are things that you should assume any high quality ESP is providing. You can scratch off any ESP that doesn’t provide:

• Hundreds of templates
• Resources and guides
• Tracking and statistics
• List management and unsubscribe services

Next, you want to eliminate a further wave of companies by looking at some of the add-on services you may be interested in. Some of these add-on features include:

• Autoresponders
• Surveys

Finally, you want to take a look at a few distinguishing characteristics that make the best cheap email marketing companies stand out from the others. Take a look at:

• Deliverability rates
• Customer satisfaction (the user and the user’s customers)
• Industry specific needs
• Prices and plans

If you try to find your ESP following this three pronged elimination strategy, you should end up with a cheap email marketing provider that perfectly matches your needs. Here are a few good places to start looking:

Sign up for an iContact free trial with plans starting at $9.95 per month

Sign up for a Constant Contact free trial – plans starting at $15 per month

Transforming from Expensive to Cheap

If you’re already running an email campaign you can certainly find ways to trim your current costs. You want to make the most out of the emails you send. First, take a look to see whether your account is billed by list size or by total emails sent. It will help give you direction for the action steps you should take.

Being billed by total list members – or crossing a threshold into a higher billing area due to your list size – should make you focus on really getting the most from each and every person on that list. Cheap email marketing is about quality, not quantity.

Start shaving off wasted list members by sending out brief customer surveys or by manually removing those list members who always bounce or who have been inactive for a long period. The result is that you’ll be left with a smaller, but much more heavily engaged list.

If your high bill comes from the total number of messages you send, you can still decrease that by lowering your total list size. Additionally, you can start focusing on creating more effective messages. Every ineffective or inappropriate email message you send out just tacks on more costs. Here’s a few ways you can make more out of each of your messages:

• Short, compelling, informative subject lines
• A point to every message (rather than the generic, “Hey what’s up? Buy something.” email)
• Engaging, useful content
• Clear calls to action in multiple locations of the email

Following these steps you can turn any expensive or wasteful program into a lean, mean, cheap email marketing machine.

Don’t forget about our Race to 50 New RSS Subscribers with a chance to win a free email marketing consultation package.

Here are some factors that may be leading to the messages from your email marketing program being tagged as SPAM along with what you can do to prevent that from happening. Wouldn’t it be great to reside amongst the very happy 6% of messages that are positively received by their intended audiences?

Your messages aren’t reaching your list members. The problem could be that your email marketing ASP isn’t reliable enough. Do some research into which email service providers have the highest deliverability rates, which have good reputations and so forth. Problems could arise for many reasons including if you get assigned a recycled IP address or if the servers of your email marketing ASP are overstuffed.

Your messages aren’t being identified. Your list members may be having a hard time distinguishing your messages from the saturated, nearly all encompassing SPAM pile (Remember, 94 percent!). To remedy the situation you need to be sure to have a recognizable name in the “From” field. Your subject line needs to be short, to the point and grammatically correct. Read more on this issue in a former email marketing tip of the week.

Your messages aren’t being read. You may not be compelling enough with the subject lines your email marketing program utilizes. Additionally, it may be time to scrub your list clean of list members who are uninterested in your messages. From here on out, get some information on your list members when they signup. Find out what kinds of messages they want to receive from you so you can segment them accordingly. Don’t forget to set the ground rules either. Inform your new list members when they can expect to receive your messages and how frequently you’ll be in their inbox.

Your messages aren’t being displayed properly. What kind of template or design are you using within your emails? Excessive images can leave the monitors of your list members filled with open spaces and X marks. Complicated HTML or other coding languages could load improperly. Keep your templates simple and clean, and consider offering a text only option for subscribers. Check out another post to learn more about choosing an email marketing template.

Starting from sheer deliverability and ending with your emails being displayed properly, there are lots of landmines and pitfalls that your email marketing program can run into. Find a quality email marketing ASP, identify yourself, compel and target your list members and design your messages effectively and your email marketing program will hopefully find a home in that 6% sliver of opportunity.

Some people are at a loss for how to do this but the truth is it shouldn’t be too difficult to change the style and focus of your messages in order to connect with your list at a much more appropriate and effective level. Here are some ideas you can use to reach out to your list more successfully.

Learn when they signup – Find out about your email list members when they signup for your list by providing a checkbox question where they can pick what kinds of messages they want to hear from you. This will help you segment your list (see below) but will also provide you with firsthand information on what your list members actually want to be receiving from you.

Conduct a survey – Most email service providers today come with survey features that will allow you reach out to your existing list with easy to use and effective surveys. Ask them straightforward questions without being afraid of receiving negative feedback. Ask them what they like and don’t like about your emails, what you should change, what’d they like to see more of and so on. Use a combination of multiple choice questions and open ended short answer questions for maximum results.

Segment your list – Using the above information or other data that you have on your list members you should segment them into smaller, more focused groups. This will allow you to send out specific newsletters or blasts that only the most interested people will receive. See last week’s email marketing tip of the week for more information on segmenting and targeting your list.

Get personal – Far too many businesses try to take the approach of providing a completely impersonal message or service. Customers want to buy something, not have a friend, right? Well it’s actually far more effective to personalize all of your communications. Show a small picture of yourself in every newsletter so people can associate a name and face with your business. Share a short anecdote. Take questions and answers. Be honest. Show some personality.

Switch your perspective – Hopefully you view all of your newsletters when they go out. Next time, don’t view them as the satisfied creator, view them as the skeptical list member. If you received this message from another company, what would you think? Would you want to buy something or take another action? Would you roll your eyes at all of the self promotion or ineffective sales tactics? If you can’t give yourself an honest review, have your friends or family members do it for you.

Remember, you have to reach out to your list members on their level. Provide them the information they want in the way they want to get it. Segment your group, get personal and view your emails critically.

Hopefully this email marketing tip of the week can help your organization more effectively connect with your list members and improve the success of your email campaigns.

4 Myths About Email Campaign Management

It’s time consuming – A lot of people shy away from getting started with email campaigns because they think it’s going to eat up all of their time. Not only is this not true, but with all of the tools and time saving services available today you can run your campaign without taking up much time at all. From templates to writing services to automatic email tracking services and more, email campaign management is quicker and easier now than it’s ever been before.

It costs a lot of money – Obviously keeping your budget under control has to be a top priority for any company. But email campaigns don’t have to break the bank. Actually, email campaigns have the lowest cost per customer acquisition or new sale out of any communication or outreach program, including direct mail, telemarketing, mass advertising and more. Comprehensive plans from industry leaders start at amazingly low prices, including $10 per month at iContact and $15 per month at Constant Contact.

It’s confusing – There are all of these rumors circulating that email campaign management is some kind of rocket science that is extremely complex and confusing. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. All you need to know are 6 important email marketing statistics that can help you gain a complete understanding of how effective your campaigns are and how you might be able to improve them.

It’s pointless – “I’m just going to end up as SPAM anyway, so what’s the point?” Oh, how it pains me when people say something like this! You can easily stay out of those pesky SPAM filters if you just follow some best practices of permission based email marketing. You’ll see that far more people will receive your emails than will look at a postcard you send them in the mail, listen to your radio commercial or pick up that dinnertime phone call.

These myths are just more obstacles to overcome towards running successful email campaigns. The truth about email campaign management is that it’s simple, quick and cheap and it will pay major dividends for your company.

5 Ways to Differentiate Between Email Marketing Programs

1. Price: The price for different email service providers can be quite different. Many popular programs start plans for between $10 and $20. However, many other companies really target larger businesses and have services that start at $100 or more.

Additionally, your price may increase based on different factors. Some companies increase price based on total emails sent, while others increase price based on the size of the list you have, regardless of the number of emails you send.

2. Surveys: Many businesses today are turning to customer survey software to help them connect with their customers and clients and to further improve their own offerings. There are of course many separate providers that deal with surveys, however many email service providers also provide online survey solutions

The benefit to integrating the two services in one spot is that you can quickly send out a survey to your entire list or to particular segments of your list without having to export or recreate your list in a separate environment. Of course, housing both services under one roof can also lower costs and provide a level of convenience that two separate services couldn’t provide. If you’re also in the market for customer survey software, than you should seek out the email marketing programs that provide that as well.

3. Customer Support: When you encounter a problem or have a question, you need a company that is going to be responsive to your needs. With options such as forums and live chatting in addition to emails and phone calls, you should have plenty of ways to reach out to the staff of most email service providers. However, some take more pride than others in this area and you’ll quick see which businesses live up to your expectations.

4. Templates: You want to have a vast selection of templates to choose between. Only a handful, no matter how great they look, isn’t going to help you out very much. You need to stand out from your competition not blend in with them. Additionally, consider that email marketing programs often target different types of businesses and therefore will have more templates geared towards specific areas or styles than others.

5. List Management and Building: What are the options you have for building your list and managing it? You should be able to break down your list based on a wide range of variables. You should also have signup links and buttons for your websites as well as an autoresponder.

Finally, steer clear of any company that says they will provide your list for you and build your list instantly. Purchasing email lists is a great way to land yourself in legal trouble while you watch your campaigns flounder along without success.

As you can see, there are clearly plenty of ways to differentiate between different services and providers. These are just 5 ways that should help you spot which email marketing programs may be the best fit for your organization.

Email Marketing Opt In

Optin email marketing is basically the honest, legitimate way of email marketing wherein people sign up for your list willingly and manually. You may be offering something on your website to encourage them to sign up, they might do it without any pushing from you at all or you might hound them into it with pop ups across the screen every two minutes. Either way, the point is they manually opt into your email marketing list.

The only thing an email marketing opt in does is provide a link and a text box, so they can enter in their address and send it through the system. Your email service provider captures that information and adds the new user to your email marketing list. A basic optin email marketing service may redirect the person to a thank you page, show them a thank you or confirmation on screen or even in some cases send them a double opt-in or confirmation email.

Email Autoresponders

Autoresponders take things a step further than that. When somebody signs up for your email marketing list and you are using a full autoresponder service, your email service provider will immediately send out their first message at the time of your choosing.

Going forward from there, you can setup an entire string of emails to be sent in intervals so you can stay in contact with your new list members and quickly convert them into customers. This is a great service to have when you are providing an instructional series or eBook via email, when you provide a series of reviews or when you have planned messages that old list members already received but new ones have not.

An autoresponder does not necessarily have to be tied into your email marketing opt in either. You can set up this kind of service to kick in after somebody contacts you, or you can segment your existing list and begin attacking them with different, automatically sent campaigns.

So really, autoresponders can be put to use with a great optin email marketing strategy, but the two aren’t completely the same. Autoresponders represent a far larger picture of functionality and communication, which if used properly can do wonders for converting a prospect or email marketing lead into a paying customer. An email marketing opt in is designed purely to get people onto your list, and may or may not include any automatic responses.

The great news is that the majority of the best email marketing software providers offer free trials and demos that can help you see firsthand their strengths and their potential. This goes a long way towards helping people understand what they’re getting into.

Companies such as MailChimp, Bronto and Listrak are just a few of the popular choices and all offer flexible and powerful programs. It doesn’t come close to stopping there though, here’s a list with about 100 different email service providers. In the future, I’ll plan on reviewing many of these different providers as well as comparing their services. In the mean time, here are two of my personal favorites.

iContact Web Based Email Marketing Software

iContact is probably the most feature rich, affordably priced email service provider around. They have plans starting at just $9.95 a month, and considering what you get for that price tag, the value is extraordinary. iContact has over 300 templates that you can choose between and the service includes survey tools and blogging and RSS capabilities as well.

You’ll be able to archive your newsletters on the web, and make use of their autoresponder tools to build your company’ list. They have a strong reputation and great deliverability rates, and offer complete list management and tracking services.

Sign up for an iContact free trial here

Constant Contact Web Based Email Marketing Software

Constant Contact has plans starting at $15 per month, scaling up depending on the size of your list. You have a powerful survey tool at your disposal, although you will have to pay an additional monthly fee to use it after a free trial. One of the best things about the Constant Contact web based email marketing software is how easy the interface is to use and get accustomed it.

You’ll have hundreds of templates to choose between, broken down into easy to find categories. You’ll also have a comprehensive tracking system and full list management and segmentation abilities.

Sign up for a Constant Contact free trial here

This was by no means meant to be a comprehensive or complete guide on the best email service providers. It was meant to whet your appetite a bit and get you ready to dive in and try one of these companies out for yourself. The only way to really make a decision that you’re happy with is to learn by doing. Plus, with a free trial, it’s hard to go wrong.

If you’re new to the world of email communications and online marketing, consider one of these web based email marketing software companies to get you and your company started in the right direction.

Remember, you plan on entrusting this person or agency with one of your principle methods of customer and prospect outreach. Don’t take the decision lightly.

What’s their track record? An email marketing agency that has been successfully completing campaigns and performing valuable services for their clients will prominently display their track record of success. Generic testimonials are fine, but what you really want to see is the hard data that shows, for example, that Company Y saw a 50% increase in conversions after switching to their new email marketing consultant. Good companies have good track records, and they display them proudly.

What’s their reputation? Of course you want to choose an email marketing agency that delivers results. But choosing one that puts success above legality – or morality – is shortsighted and could end up hurting your organization’s credibility, and even landing you in hot water with the government. Make sure the company you choose has a reputation for keeping up with industry standards, laws and best practices.

Have they completed any whitepapers or research? I should preface this by saying that not all successful and reputable companies take the time to create and distribute whitepapers or research projects. However, companies that do take the time to do so clearly show an attention to detail and an experience level that others might not have. Browse around for any thorough, published documents released by the consultant you’re checking out to give you a better idea of their expertise.

Will they be committed to you? Sometimes the best email marketing agency in the world is a little bit too popular for its own good. With a client list that resembles the phone book, how can you be sure your campaign is going to get the level of attention and the amount of time that it deserves? There’s of course nothing wrong with having a huge repertoire of clients, but you will want to make sure that any consultant you choose has the staff in place to handle your email campaign with care.

How much do they cost? Last but certainly not least, you have to figure out if the price they are charging is worth the services you are receiving. I wish I could provide a general price range that could serve as a guide to see if their fees are fair. However, what one email marketing agency charges for a campaign another charges for an hour of work. Additionally, you may only require a portion of the services that another company requests.

Ultimately, the money you end up paying has to be worth it or you. That means considering the results the agency provides, the time and hassle the agency saves you and so forth. Nobody else can tell you what’s too much or too little to pay.

If you’ve asked yourself these 5 questions, you may have a better idea of whether or not the email marketing consultant you have been using, or considering using, is a good fit for your company. The perfect email marketing agency for one company isn’t necessarily the perfect agency for yours, so do your homework and keep these questions in mind.